‘A critical tipping point’: Lori Lightfoot pleads with TX Gov. Abbott to stop sending migrants to Chicago

Lori Lightfoot isn’t ending her one-term stint as Chicago’s mayor on a bang. She’s going out with a whimper.

Though Chicago is a proud “sanctuary city,” Lightfoot penned a letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott and begged him not to send any more illegal migrants to her already crime-ridden town, claiming that bussing the border-jumpers to the Windy City is “inhumane and dangerous.”

“The City of Chicago is aware that the State of Texas is planning to resume bussing individuals and families to cities throughout the United States, including Chicago, starting Monday, May 1st,” she wrote. “I am, yet again, appealing to your better nature and asking that you stop this inhumane and dangerous action.”

Lightfoot noted that, since August 2022, Chicago has “shouldered the responsibility of caring for more than 8,000 men, women, and children with no resources of their own,” thanks to Abbott’s relocation policies.

For context, in August 2022, there were 203,598 encounters with illegal migrants along the southwest land border, “a 1.7 percent increase compared to July [2022],” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Lightfoot wrote that “nearly all the migrants” sent to Chicago “have been in dire need of food, water, and clothing and many needed extensive medical care.”

“Some of the individuals you placed on buses were women in active labor,” she claimed, “and some were victims of sexual assault. None of these urgent needs were addressed in Texas. Instead, these individuals and families were packed onto buses and shipped across the country like freight without regard to their personal circumstances.”

Lightfoot doesn’t explain why she believes small, overwhelmed border towns in Texas are better equipped to handle the unending influx of migrants across the Biden administration’s open border than a major metropolitan city such as Chicago, but she is certain that her backyard is not the place for them.

“Chicago is a Welcoming City and we collaborate with County, State, and community partners to rise to this challenge, but your lack of consideration or coordination in an attempt to cause chaos and score political points has resulted in a critical tipping point in our ability to receive individuals and families in a safe, orderly, and dignified way,” she told Gov. Abbott. “We simply have no more shelters, spaces, or resources to accommodate an increase of individuals at this level, with little coordination or care, that does not pose a risk to them or others.”

To tell the needy migrants to go to Chicago “or to inhumanely bus them here is an enviable and misleading choice,” Lightfoot wrote.

Like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Lightfoot’s leadership crumbled when given just a taste of what the rural towns in Texas face on a daily basis.

In January, Adams traveled to El Paso, Texas, to see the devastation for himself.

“We’re pointing the finger … at our national government,” Adams said at a press conference with El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser. “This is a national problem. We must have real immigration reform, and we must immediately have a short-term fix of making sure that the cost of this does not fall on our local cities.”

“No city deserves this,” Adams added. “El Paso does not deserve this, Chicago, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, New York… no city deserves what is happening.”

Lightfoot told Abbott that she was “sympathetic to the significant challenges that border cities face,” however, she informed the governor that she will call upon the federal government “to withhold all FEMA funding slated for Texas if chartered buses resume coming to our city.”

Because that will certainly help keep the migrants “dignified” and humanely treated.

“I would rather work with you than against you,” Lightfoot wrote.

On Twitter, the outgoing Chicago mayor was blasted for her hypocrisy.

“So Texas should shoulder the burden of millions of illegal immigrants while Illinois democrats score self-esteem points by declaring their governed areas a sanctuary?” one user asked. “Pretty easy to talk the talk when the border is a thousand miles away and bad border policy doesn’t reach you…”

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